Honest Care

Design research

Honest Care

A deep dive into long-term care decision making.

SUMMARYHonest Care is an initial concept for a Facebook plug in that allows users to see which of their friends has experience with long-term care. Direct messages can be sent through the Facebook plug in, facilitating the exchange of advice and recommendations.

THE CHALLENGE

By the year 2040, we will have over a million people in the United States over the age of 100. The majority of Americans will need some form of long-term care over the age of 65, yet few of us actually have the policies to cover the care we need.

HOW MIGHT WE

THE CONCEPT

To bring the idea to life, I created a poster that outlines a value statement, the persona, benefits and an illustration of how a solution might work.

VALUE STATEMENT

When making a choice about long-term care, people trust the experiences of friends and family more than a potentially paid advisor or service provider. But, people don’t enjoy talking about long-term care so the experience of those within our network often goes unnoticed.

PERSONA

Geared towards a family member and key decision maker for a loved one in need of long-term care services who is seeking a trusted and impartial advice on which services and professionals to work with.

Users can see who in their network has experience with long-term care and in what capacity (ex. dementia, hospice).

The advice is not sponsored.

Users can connect to one another directly via chat within the app.

RESEARCH GUIDE

OBJECTIVE

To understand how people living in the US, with a variety of experience with long-term care, think about, plan for, and enter into long-term care.

PARTICIPANTS

I conducted four one on one phone interviews with people in my network that were comfortable openly discussing something as sensitive as long-term care. The recruits had a variety of experience with long-term care from those with little to no knowledge to that of a carer and health expert.

ONE PAGE SUMMARIES

KEY FINDINGS

DISCUSSING DEATH IS TABOO

We do not openly discuss our experiences with something as sensitive as long-term care, even with the people we are closest to.

COMPLEX SYSTEM

The long-term health care system is incredibly complex, with a multitude of services and stake holders. The complexity of the system makes it difficult to navigate as an ‘outsider’ (a care recipient or a family member).

FINDING A CARE TEAM IS TOUGH

Finding the right long-term health care plan and a care team is challenging and time consuming.

IT’S DIFFICULT TO FIND IMPARTIAL ADVICE

The American health care system is geared toward turning a profit. As such, even when a professional is providing advice on a health insurance policy or a service, it’s difficult to know if their advice is impartial.

SYNTHESIS & IDEATION

A group of four of us came together and clustered our insights based upon the research we individually collected. Using our one page summaries, we clustered our observations according to commonalities to find insights. We then crafted how might we statements for each insight and used dot voting to select the top four.

Using a creative matrix with our problem statements in the columns and different solution types, such as 'products and technology' and 'business models and services' in the rows, we quickly diverged and generated lots of solutions.